An analysis of a 1.5 million-year-old vertebra from a human relative living in what is now Israel suggests that ancient humans dispersed out of Africa in multiple waves.
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00:00There is a continuous debate about the nature of out-of-Africa migration.
00:05Was this a one-time event or did it take place on multiple occasions?
00:17The site of Ubediah is found close to the southern edge of the Sea of Galilee,
00:22near Kibbutz Beit Zera, and is one of the earliest prehistoric sites to be found outside of Africa
00:27and dates to around 1.5 million years ago. The only other site that predates Ubediah is the Manisi
00:34in the Republic of Georgia, which dates to around 1.8 million years ago.
00:41Ubediah was discovered and excavated in the early 60s by many of the famous Israeli pre-historians
00:48who uncovered rich stone tools assemblages that were used by early humans, together with numerous
00:54animal bones, some of which went extinct long time ago, like saber-toothed cats and mammoths,
00:59while others are not usually associated with Israel, such as hippos, rhinos, and big crocodiles.
01:07In 2018, Miriam Bellmaker won a National Science Foundation grant to study the ancient climate
01:13and to accurately date the site. While studying animal bones from the site, she came across a
01:19vertebra with a human-like feature that was actually excavated in 1966. Together with Professor El-Abbin,
01:26we studied the vertebra and came up with some new and important conclusions. First, it is a fossilized
01:34early human bone that belonged to a child. We know so because of the shape of the vertebra and the fact
01:41that it is incomplete, meaning that it did not finish its growing process. We estimate that had it reach
01:48adulthood. This individual would be around 1.8 meters tall and weigh about 19 kilograms. These numbers are
01:56similar to some of the large-bodied hominins that are found in Africa in the similar time period,
02:05but are very different from the small-bodied hominins that we found in Georgia. Second,
02:11he will witness two distinct human species at the same time period, which is known as the lower
02:17Pleistocene outside of Africa. We know that the earliest stages of human evolution took place in
02:25Africa based on the fossil record and by comparing DNA data from apes and humans. However, over the years,
02:33there is a continuous debate about the nature of out-of-Africa migration. Was this a one-time event,
02:40or did it take place on multiple occasions? And who were the people who migrated out of Africa?
02:47Our current study indicates that early hominins migrated at least twice and in two distinct ways.
02:54This is because the people of Dmanisi are different in size and shape from those in Ubadia. Moreover,
03:01Dr. Omri Barzilai studied the stone artifacts from both sides, conclude that the stone manufacturing
03:08techniques as well as the stone tools themselves are different. Prof. Miriam Bellmaker concludes that
03:14the climate as well as the animals are also different in both sides. Thus, with each migration
03:22waves came new and different types of hominins with their own stone-making traditions, which may indicate
03:30maybe about their cognitive abilities and the different preferences of their ecological niche and habitat.
03:39Thank you for listening and have a great day.